As applications become increasingly powerful, a key target in developing successful software is to provide functionality in as a simple and consumable way as possible. The functionality provided by applications is presented to the user through a User Interface (UI), which themselves have seen a corresponding increase in complexity as the capabilities of the underlying application grows. Given that the UI acts as the boundary between the user and the application, a poorly designed or overly complex UI can markedly reduce a user's satisfaction with the product, or even prevent the user from benefiting from the application's capabilities.
For the purpose of the discussion herein, the complexity of a UI is defined by its “navigability” (the ease of navigating through the UI) and its “simplicity” (the ease of exercising functionality presented by the UI). Navigability reflects, for example, how many panels the user has to navigate through to perform a given task, while simplicity reflects for example the number of possible data fields/actions a user has to fill/perform to execute a defined functional task in the application. Overall complexity is often a delicate balance between navigability and simplicity. Attempting to improve navigability, by reducing the number of panels to navigate through, has the consequence of worsening its simplicity; in other words, it becomes harder for the user to identify necessary actions on a given panel, as it becomes increasingly overloaded with options.
There are several problems facing architects, developers and testers of UIs. For example, although significant effort is conventionally spent in testing an application's core functionality, the UI traditionally receives less attention and is treated subjectively rather than undergoing objective analysis. This is surprising given the recognition of its importance, but may reflect a lack of tooling and unbiased approaches. Further, it has been appreciated by the inventors that a new user's first impression is typically gained through exercising core (“Golden Path”) tasks, and thus that it is important to ensure that such tasks are the simplest, even at the possible expense of increased complexity for less-frequently used “advanced” tasks.
There is currently a lack of tools to measure quantitatively and objectively the complexity of a UI. Further, current tooling gives a very poor view of complexity in relation to the rest of the interface under test, particularly concerning the importance of Golden Paths.